Note: This guide was written from the perspective of an Arduino Uno owner. The Uno is the most newbie-friendly Arduino available as most tutorials target the Uno, so that’s the model we recommend for first-timers. It’s also the one included in most starter kits.

What’s In Your Starter Kit?

The very first thing you should do is get comfortable with the starter kit you have. Depending on the actual kit you purchased, the components available to you will differ. For example, yours may include an LCD display but lack any sensors.

Spend some time on Google and Wikipedia and briefly study each component just to get a sense of what everything can do. You don’t need to know the nitty-gritty details yet, but it’s helpful to know the potential of your starter kit.

Where to Learn Arduino Skills

Once your Arduino is set up and ready to go, it’s time to take a step back. One of the biggest reasons why people get frustrated with the Arduino is because they don’t understand how electronics work, and as a result, the learning curve is too steep — so they quit.

So instead of diving straight into your first basic Arduino project, we actually recommend learning about circuits instead. I know you’re probably itching to build something right away, but trust that this will make your Arduino journey much more fun and pleasant in the long run.

Once you have a rudimentary understanding of circuits and electronics, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of Arduino. Again, before you get hands-on and practical, we recommend getting acquainted with the basic concepts first, such as the layout of an Arduino and how a breadboard works.

Project Ideas for Arduino Newbies

By now, you should know what an Arduino is, what all the different components in your starter kit are, how circuits work at a basic level, and what you can potentially accomplish with all of this. That means it’s time for you to actually build something!

If your starter kit was any good, it probably came with a few sample projects to try. If so, you should work through them one by one — assuming the instruction book is any good. Some starter kits have terrible instruction books that are more confusing than helpful, in which case you should shelve it for now.

Built-In Examples

The official Arduino software comes with several built-in examples that provide a good progression for learning. Start with the projects called Bare Minimum, Blink, and Digital Read Serial (in that order) as they are the simplest.

How to Find Arduino Help

There’s one more thing you need to know: Arduino is not something you can pick up overnight. If you don’t have any prior tinkering experience, it’ll take at least a few weeks before you really grasp the concepts — and throughout that time, you’re going to run into a lot of obstacles and questions.

And while there are a lot of great Arduino answers and resources that you can find by searching on the Web, sometimes it’s just faster to ask real people. Interacting with others will probably make the answers sink in better, plus you may make a few friends along the way.

Here are some communities to check out:

Official Arduino Forums: With more than 2.5 million posts from over 350,000 users, this is the largest Arduino community on the Web by far. Whether newbie or veteran, there are subforums for every aspect of Arduino. The international boards are a bonus, too.

/r/Arduino: Reddit has a lot of active communities dedicated to electronics and DIY, but this particular one is great for Arduino newbies. You can also try /r/AskElectronics for more advanced circuit inquiries.

Electronics Stack Exchange: Like Reddit, Stack Exchange is a collection of many communities, and this one is specifically for electronics. Arduino is one of the more popular topics here, so if you have an issue, don’t hesitate to ask for help.

If you got this far, you should now be well equipped to learn everything you need to know about Arduino and how to progress even when you run into trouble. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask us below.

Did this help? Are there any Arduino resources worth mentioning that we missed? Got any advice or recommendations for an Arduino newbie? Share with us in the comments below!

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Nikhil Chandak

February 9, 2016 at 5:52 pm

Great to know about Arduino tricks. But could please post up a similar article for Raspberry Pi.I just bought a Raspberry Pi B+ with the starter kit a few days back. I can make some little things out of it but none of the cool ones. Would love if you wrote a similar article on Pi.